How I backed up 12 gigabytes of World Series photos

It’s fun sharing historic photos like this one, which I shot at last night’s World Series finale. Preserving the additional thousands of post-season shots I took at Yankee Stadium over the past few weeks may not be fun, but it’s important because it will let me mine that photo collection for all sorts of purposes for years.

There are numerous ways to create backups of important files. For a brief overview, see our video on computer backups (embedded below). Our computer backup system buying guide (available for subscribers) provides much more detailed advice along with brand-name recommendations of systems we’ve tested.

Since I back up a lot of photos and prefer quick access to them, I use external hard drives.

(Storing them externally also keeps my computer’s internal hard drive from becoming cluttered with image files.) And because I always make at least two backup copies of important photos (in case one set of copies is lost) before I delete them from the camera’s memory card, I use two drives.

To back up my thousands of post-season shots, after each game, I copied the shots from that game to a 1.5-terabyte (TB) external hard drive. Then I copied those files from that external hard drive to a second, more portable 500GB external drive. (I have a computer at a distant geographical location, so I occasionally take the smaller, portable drive with me and copy photos to the hard drive on that off-site computer.) Only then did I delete the photos from the memory card.

This approach may not be for everybody. If your needs are more modest, an inexpensive thumb drive or writeable DVD might serve just as well.

If you have tips to share on how you preserve your photo files, post them below. —Jeff Fox

Comments

[Jeff Blyskal]

I backed up AVI video files to an external drive. Unfortunately, the drive one day simply stopped mounting and my PC can't communicate with it. I'm sure the data is still there, if I can find a computer forensic expert to retrieve it.

Luckily, I also burned two copies of the video files (not just the final edited video movie) to DVDs. Now I worry: What if THEY get scratched or overheated???

[jay]

My images folder is up to about 80K images requiring a total storage space of about 200G. I keep the primary copy on an internal drive (it's annoyingly slow to work with them otherwise), backing up to external drive every few days. I too retain the images on their original camera cards until the internal drive is backed up.

I also shoot thousands of pictures on the road, using a laptop with limited internal drive space. I take two 500G external drives, which become the primary and backup image repositories for the trip.

My image folder has been doubling in size every few years since I switched to digital in 1994*. This growth rate will probably accelerate - sensors are bigger every year, and cameras shoot faster, and today's SLR's shoot huge HD videos besides. I once feared this progression would cripple my shooting style, but it has turned out otherwise: during that same time disk capacity has grown much faster than my images, roughly following Moore's law. My 200G fits more comfortably on today's 1T disks than yesterday's 60G image folder fit into the 200G disks of the time. This easygoing relationship is likely to hold for the foreseeable future.

*yes, 1994. I bought an Apple Quicktake and haven't bought a roll of film since.

[Harry Flashman]

I use three methods: 1-local external drive, 2-Mozy (www.mozy.com) online backup for everything and 2-Dropbox (www.getdropbox.com) for day to day replication.